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Phantom.exe
2009-05-16, 11:49 AM
Greetings!

In my games, I find myself to be a real fiend for music; I almost constantly have some source of soundtrack. I download all sorts of albums and pieces for battles, town, and so forth.

I am willing to share a few of my finds... if people can reccomend a good site to host them on.


Moreso, I am looking for more 'ambient' soundtrack pieces;

- something for travel in the fields
- soundtracks for when the party is in town
- the sounds of battle in the background
- Ambient rain or storms
- Wind?

...and if anyone has any other reccomendations, please, feel free to post.

Tsotha-lanti
2009-05-16, 12:12 PM
Blair Witch 2 soundtrack CD. Ambient nature sounds, almost exclusively. Very cool.

Midnight Syndicate has a lot of instrumental gothic (as in the 19th century literary movement, not as in Hot Topic) D&D music; perfect for gothic horror and especially Ravenloft. Some CDs are instrumental-only, some are both. It's not ambient, though.

An Enemy Spy
2009-05-16, 12:41 PM
I can tell you this from experiance. Do not use Devils Monsters from Halo. What was supposed to be a small encounter with a few skellys turned into 20 minutes of hell with that insidious song in the background.

Moose Fisher
2009-05-16, 01:05 PM
If you have games installed onto your computer, try pulling the songs out of those.

Bethesda's games have lots of ambient music that are easy to access.


As for albums, I enjoy Tin Hat Trio's Book of Silk. I've been meaning to purchase more from them.


Also, put some of the music you have into Pandora radio. Good way to find new groups and songs.

AslanCross
2009-05-17, 08:57 AM
Wilderness Travel:
-Boy from Britannia (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVZM6ILJLro) (I'm using this for the Witchwood in my run of Red Hand of Doom)
-Poison Prison (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtfOn_6MZd4): Probably not for fields, but definitely something for a Mordor-like land or the BBEG's fortress. Includes marching sounds and cultic chanting.

Town:
-Reversed Thinking (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=133Tx7h5VJM) (also in use in Red Hand of Doom). Kind of eerie.
-Neverwinter Nights 2 Main Theme (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGT7IY91jIE).
-Memory Museum (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV4-Om55mCI&feature=related)
-Paris Cathedral (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_ih1V9ZP8&feature=related). Includes a creepy organ playing in the distance. Great for sneaking around a large temple.

Phantom.exe
2009-05-17, 09:52 PM
Eh heh. I'll keep the "Devil's Monsters" out of mind.

I've heard Midnight Syndicate suggested to me before; I guess I'll finally give them a look-see. And as far as the Blair Witch 2 - I never saw that one coming.

Aslan! Thanks a lot! Perfect!

Mando Knight
2009-05-17, 10:32 PM
Field? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY3RwWDSQlM) You had to ask about field (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW7lnrc12gM)music (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0woDhBRPe4)?

And storms (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znio6fc7Wfo)?

Bierhoff
2009-05-17, 11:28 PM
Atmosphere lite ( http://www.vectormediasoftware.com/atmlitehome.htm ) can be downloaded for free and used to create atmospheric ambient sound effects. The program while run alongside other media players, so you can have the thunder and rain of a storm as well as music (say a little Vivaldi) running at the same time.

Decoy Lockbox
2009-05-18, 03:12 AM
I personally prefer Nox Arcana to Midnight syndicate for my vaguely gothic ambient music, but they are both good.

I ran a game a while back that required creepy forest music, and I used these ambient Burzum songs:

Den Onde Kysten (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEXgRq4Kp0g&feature=related)
Rundgang um die transzendentale Säule (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-x6BU9u0sQ)
Tomhet (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbmSnnpMSNw)

The guy behind Burzum, Varg Vikernes, used to play quite a bit of D&D back in the day (in fact the album cover shown on the first song I posted is his hand-drawn rendition of the cover for the Temple of Elemental Evil module). He also has a song called, aptly enough, Dungeons of Darkness (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BajdtSD0eWk), which definitely sounds like a dank, subterranean crypt would.

I have to warn you not to listen to other Burzum tracks though, unless you enjoy black metal. If you do, you probably already like Burzum.

Satyr
2009-05-18, 03:51 AM
With the years I have collected quite a library of background music, mostly from movies and computer games (sometimes, these are very easy to get if you have the game installed, and some publishers offer their games' soundtracks as free downloads). There are also background music bands, like the aforementioned Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana; I personally prefer the German band Erdenstern (http://www.erdenstern.de/?lang=en) for this, but this may be a question of taste, not actual quality.

The only thing I would almost always recommend is using instrumental-only musicm because I found that vocals are often distracting.

And if you you really want to create an atmosphere of immediate threat and panic, nothing, absolutely nothing can compete with Lustmord (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q79VKiulRcI&feature=related). (if you belong to the people who find the majority of the stuff listed on the TV tropes Nightmare fuel page actually scary, you probably should not open this link). So if you ever had the feeling that your players aren't scared enough, try it.
And if you want to turn your players into catatonic who are affraid of the dark, try this: Take your usual background music and run it according to the scenes of the game. Use a second media player to play a Lustmord track - any Lustmord track, but Immersion (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdAg_bNoBGQ&feature=related) is a personal favorite of me - and run it paralell to the standard track in repeat. I made this by accident, and the effect was stunning. One of the players became so jumpy, she almost kicked her own cat, as it suddenly touched her leg. I think that with two different tracks, the second one, especially when it appears mostly random is not recognized to be just another music track, especially when it is not as loud as the more obvious one. I found it especially helpful for creating the soundtrack to a hidden threat or intrigue, with a joyful, friendly theme on top, and a monstrous underneath.